1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus for processing embroidery data and a program stored on a computer readable medium for processing embroidery data by which the sewing of an embroidery pattern is performed by an embroidery sewing machine, using an embroidery frame, and, more particularly, to the manipulation of the embroidery data, if the embroidery pattern that is embroidered in accordance with the embroidery data is larger than a predetermined workable area of sewing within the embroidery frame.
2. Description of Related Art
An embroidery sewing machine is arranged to perform embroidery in accordance with embroidery data and furnished with an apparatus for processing the embroidery data, based on shape data that represents the shape of a pattern to be embroidered. The embroidery data processing apparatus is comprised, e.g., a general-purpose personal computer system and peripherals such as an image scanner, hard disk drive, keyboard, and CRT display which are connected to the computer system. In the embroidery data processing apparatus, the shape data is obtained by reading it from, e.g., a hard disk, and extracting it from image data generated by having an original picture scanned by the image scanner.
Using the shape data thus obtained, embroidery is performed on a cloth secured in the embroidery frame. If the size of a pattern that is embroidered in accordance with the embroidery data is larger than a predetermined workable area of sewing within the embroidery frame, the embroidery cannot be performed. For such a large embroidery pattern that is greater than the predetermined workable area of sewing within the embroidery frame, conventionally, the following method has been taken: dividing the embroidery pattern into parts falling within the workable area of sewing; generating embroidery data for each part of the pattern; and finally combining all the parts into the embroidery pattern.
Contrivances relating to the embroidery data processing apparatus that divides an embroidery pattern greater than a given workable area of sewing into parts falling within the workable area of the embroidery sewing machine and generates divisional embroidery data are described in Japanese patent application laid-open publication No. H11-57260 (1999-57260) and Japanese patent application laid-open publication No. 2000-24350.
The embroidery data processing apparatus described in the above publications is able to embroider even such a large embroidery pattern by dividing it into a sewing region falling within the maximum size of sewing by the embroidery sewing machine. However, in this method, when a large embroidery pattern is divided into a number of sewing sections, it is very difficult to identify what position of the section that the user is going to work is in the whole embroidery pattern. This posed a problem in which, unless the user can identify what position of a sewing region that the user is going to work, the user has to retry placing and securing the embroidery medium in the embroidery frame again and again, which would be troublesome.